


this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

by humancredentials



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-28
Updated: 2015-01-28
Packaged: 2018-03-09 12:39:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3250022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/humancredentials/pseuds/humancredentials
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over the years, on the days when she was honest with herself but not with him, she’d admit she never truly believed this moment would arrive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

She never allowed herself to wonder what this moment would be like.

In fact, over the years, on the days when she was honest with herself but not with him, she’d admit she never truly believed this moment would arrive. 

She hoped it would, of course. Hope, however, failed her on too many occasions and she had no reason to believe it wouldn’t do so again. 

It didn’t stop her from following him, from helping him, from kneeling down and getting dirt under her fingernails when he asked her to, thinking her fingers would soon hit something. Someone. 

Yes, she may have lost a hope she doesn’t actually remember having, but she refused to allow him to. Besides her, hope was all he had. She wouldn’t fail him like everyone else did, like she was sure hope eventually would.

She remembers being new to him, curled up on a bed in a dingy Oregon motel room. She remembers the candle light, the sound of the rain outside, and his young face. She remembers when she first heard the name of the girl that he’d built his life around. One of the two loves of his life. 

Samantha.

She didn’t use her name much when talking about her. She isn’t sure why, she simply chose to refer to her as ‘your sister’ when talking to him. Perhaps it was a way to distance herself from it, from the young girl who she never got to meet but who managed to change her life as well. This little girl with long, braided pigtails and a mischievous smile. Forever eight years old in the eyes of the brother who would do anything for her.

She didn’t believe him seven years ago when he told her the improbable story of the night that shaped him. She didn’t need to, all she needed was to know that this child was gone and something had happened to her and the man she would grow to love more than any other needed to find his answers. 

Seven years later and she’s still standing with him, looking up at the sky, and he believes he’s found them. He talks to her about starlight, about souls, about freedom. This moment that she never dared to dream would be a reality for him is here and she is unprepared. She isn’t sure who this man is without his quest, and the thought of it ending unnerves her. 

She doesn’t know what to say to him, she isn’t quite sure she understands what this all means. He seems satisfied, which he rarely is, so she accepts this truth that he believes he’s found. She’s grateful she’s here to witness it, to be by his side at the end of this road. He always knew they’d get here. Some days his faith in this inevitability was stronger than her faith in anything else. 

Later, when they are on a plane that will take them home, take them back to the uncertainty of what is next in this grand quest of theirs, he talks to her. She hates flying, always has, regardless of how many flights she’s been on. It’s become a tradition that once they are in the air, cruising comfortably, and she’s able to loosen her grip on her armrests, he talks to her. Usually about nothing, anything to keep her mind off where she is and how long until she’s back on the ground. 

Today is different. He talks to her about something. 

"Her favorite color was purple, Scully," he says. 

It’s a simple statement and it’s the simplicity of it that tugs at her heart. For her, for him. She wasn’t just a quest, she wasn’t just a mission, she wasn’t just the family tragedy. She was a girl with a favorite color and it was purple. Why hadn’t she known this? Why doesn’t she know anything beyond the story of the night she was taken?

"I didn’t know that," she whispers in response. She suddenly wants to ask questions, wants to know everything about her. Samantha. She wants to use her name more, wants to imagine her back into reality for him.  But she doesn’t. Samantha is gone to everyone except the man who sits beside her now.

"Yeah. Not even a nice shade of purple, Scully. A loud, obnoxious shade of purple," he continues, but he can’t not smile at the memory. She can’t remember the last time he thought of his sister and smiled before today.

"Sometimes I’m afraid that I don’t remember her properly," he confesses. "Sometimes I’m afraid that I’ve just made her up. Nobody’s around to tell me."

She’s lost count of how many times her heart as broken for him. How many times she’s silently raged at the cards he has been dealt. 

Outwardly, she will tell him that his father loved him and that his mother did her best, but inwardly, she felt contempt for them both. She hated that they’d allowed him to fall apart. Hated that they’d manipulated him to the point where he doesn’t trust his own memories. Hated that at no point, did anyone take the sweet little boy she’s sure he was and tell him it wasn’t his fault. She hates the parts they both played in breaking him.

She has always done her best to make up for everything everyone else failed to give him. She’s always listened, always answered his late night phone calls, always showed up after he’s asked her to drop everything. She’s taken care of him when his father died, she’s cut open his dead mother after her final abandonment of her son.

She hadn’t wanted to, she’d made that clear. But he had no one else to turn to. Hadn’t for a very long time. She relented, did the most difficult autopsy she hopes she’ll ever perform. She remembers every detail. The cold, paper-thin skin of Teena’s fingers. She held them in her hand, wondered when the last time those fingers had touched Mulder with kindness. She remembers her eyes, so very much like his. 

But mostly, mostly remembers her anger when she discovered she had indeed left this life voluntarily. Of all the things and people that had been taken away from Mulder over the years, his mother was the one to leave him willingly. She’d never forgive her.

"She was real, Mulder," she assures him after too long of a silence. "You didn’t make her up."

She has nothing left to offer but a statement of the obvious and a reassuring squeeze of his fingers and she tries not to think of his dead mother’s hands.

 

* * *

 

It isn’t until he feels she’s betrayed him that he chooses to open up to her about this again.

They are back at his apartment after a painfully silent meeting with the Gunmen and an equally silent car ride home from the offices where she swore she’d find evidence that her betrayal had been worth it. Should have known better, should never have gone, should have told him, should have walked away, should have said something. He is the one who runs off in the name of hope, not her. She is the one who gets to be angry, not him. But not tonight. Tonight they’ve switched roles. Tonight she’s the child in trouble for running away from home.

Tonight, his anger is coming off him in waves. She doesn’t believe he has a right to it, thinks it makes him a hypocrite. But she knows this feeling well. This feeling of “I could have lost you and I couldn’t have done anything about it.” She regrets instantly that in this moment, she is yet another person who has made him feel helpless. 

She wonders if she should go home. Back to her apartment that looks and smells better than his does but she loves this apartment. Loves him. Loves the time they spend together here which is more now than it’s ever been. Their relationship has shifted. It’s about seven years too late to just go home.

The fish tank is the only sound she can hear. She watches them, envies them for being blissfully ignorant of the tension in the room. He hasn’t looked at her. He’s taken the couch, leaving no room for her, his head facing the door. She watches him, though. Thinks of how many sleepless nights that couch has seen. How many times he’s woken up on it, stumbling out of a nightmare about her, about cancer, about abductions, about burning offices, suicide, and Samantha. Usually about her.

His voice is rough from not having been used recently.

"I used to braid her hair for her, Scully," he says. 

He speaks as if it’s a natural thing to say after sitting in silence for two hours. Betrayal makes him reflective.

She doesn’t say anything. This isn’t what this conversation is supposed to be about. He’s supposed to forgive her, tell her he understands why she left with the enemy, tell her that he would have done the same thing because she  _knows_ he would have. He has before. She doesn’t want to hear about braiding hair. 

"When my parents would fight, she’d come into my room. I’d try to kick her out, try to convince her to go, but she’d never leave." 

Like me, she thinks. 

"Kinda like you," he laughs. 

If he would look at her, he’d see that made her smile.

"Anyway, in those moments when I couldn’t get her away from me, she taught me to braid her hair. Calmed her down, I guess, I don’t know. She hated all the yelling. I wish she’d remembered that more than the teasing."

She wishes that too, for him. She wishes more people remembered the good in him. He can be a suffocating presence, but he’s gentle and kind with delicate things and people. 

There’s no anger left him in tonight, she realizes, and she feels hers start to dissipate as well. It’s hard to stay angry at a man who has nothing but you. 

"You were a good brother, Mulder, she was lucky to have you," she offers. It sounds lame to her ears; fake. But she means it and he knows she does. 

She wonders what would have happened if she’d gone missing as a child. Would Bill or Charlie still be looking for her? She likes to think they would, but knows better. Most people would have cut their losses years ago. Despite all of her misfortune, Samantha won the big brother lottery. 

She can see something resembling a smile from where she sits across from the couch. 

He finally looks at her when he rises, extending his hand to her. She allows him to pull her up from her seat. Her legs are stiff, her body sore and tired. Lying to him has exhausted her. 

He takes her to bed where she is forgiven for her sins and he doesn’t dream of a dead girl. 

 

* * *

 

When he gets back from Vermont, he sits in her living room and asks her about the widely understood definition of ‘significant other’. 

She laughs at the idea of someone asking him if he had one. He must have made a face, she thinks. Probably shifted uncomfortably before giving his non committal answer. She knows him intrinsically and can picture the scene in her mind, though she was miles away in a room with no heat and watching the absolute dregs of society do unspeakable things to themselves and each other. 

"I think the term is ridiculous, Mulder," she tells him as she cleans up from dinner, which mostly consists of throwing away paper plates. He ate well on his trip, he told her of all the meals that had been cooked for him and she tried not to slap him. He’s back in reality though, where he doesn’t get many home cooked meals but he gets her. He gets this and it’s more than he ever thought he’d have.

He nods, knowing she would think this way. Knowing that she’d never answer the question at all if someone were to pose it of her. She herself isn’t sure what she would have done, but she knows the widely understood definition of the term doesn’t apply here.

He knows it, too. Significant. An understatement if she’d ever heard one. They haven’t given it much thought since the shift in their relationship. Have been in no desperate hurry to define what this is, what they are together. It took them seven years to get here. The fact that they’re here is enough, for now. There have been no emotional declarations of love. Just an easy transition from friends to lovers. Still partners. Always partners. 

Later, once they’ve satisfied their appetite after days apart and she’s listening to his heart beat against where her head rests on his chest, he tells her that he was also told that home and family could be a refuge for him.

She sighs, immediately guilty though that wasn’t his intention and she knows it. She can’t help the feeling of regret, the deep sadness that’s always lurking once they’ve finished making love. The heavy weight of the knowledge that what they’ve just done can never, will never produce a child. A little of her, a little of him, sweet and stubborn with wild eyes and distinguished features. A smart mouth and a kind heart. 

She will never give him a family.

She thinks of a different little girl, one with blonde hair and a soft smile. She thinks of him getting down on the floor, making a silly face, and making her laugh. Something she couldn’t get her to do so easily. He was a natural. He’d be a good father, she knows. 

But that little girl is gone, and she hopes that wherever she is, she’s met a girl with long brown pigtails and they share laughter rather than a coffin full of sand and hand prints in cement.

"Is that something you still want? A family?" she whispers, her breath tickling the sparse hair on his chest. Please say no. Please say yes.

She feels him shrug beneath her.

They’d tried. They try not to think about it, but they’d tried. 

She remembers the awkwardness of asking, the anxiety of waiting for an answer, him saying yes and her doctor saying no.

_"I’m so sorry, Miss Scully."_

No need to continue. Message received. 

She remembers going home, hoping he’d be there and hoping he wouldn’t be but knowing that he was. She remembers his face, the face of a man who was tallying their losses. He barely even flinches at them anymore.

Goodbye, Samantha. Goodbye, Emily. Goodbye, baby. 

She remembers being told to never give up on a miracle and wanting to laugh. 

Miracles don’t exist, Mulder, she’d wanted to yell at him. 

Nothing you believe in exists. Aliens, mothmen, vampires and miracle babies. It’s all bullshit. If miracles existed, she’d wanted to say, we’d find your sister alive. I’d never have been taken and we wouldn’t have fucked on my living room floor in an attempt to create a life that doctors couldn’t even  _force_ into existence.

The shop’s closed, Mulder, they’re all out of miracles. Come back never.

She thinks he’s drifting off to sleep, but his breathing isn’t deep enough. Sure enough, he speaks.

"I never had the family life that made it seem like something worth wanting," he tells her as if he’s sharing a secret. As if she doesn’t know what he came from.

"I wish we could —" she starts to say, and the words get stuck in her throat but thankfully he’s interrupting her anyway.

"I do too, Scully," he tells her. "I just didn’t know it until you asked."

Ah, the real secret. It isn’t something he wanted until her. This is a secret worth locking away and forgetting. 

She’d become one of  _them_. Dangling something in front of him to see how high he’d jump to reach it, only to have him realize his efforts were useless. He’d never get what he wanted but he’d still try again.

She falls asleep, wondering at the cruel irony of it all. 

She hopes his dreams are pleasant. She hopes in his dreams he’s the father he never had and she’s the kind of mother he thinks she’d be and that their babies have his eyes and her nose and she hopes that when he wakes up, he doesn’t hate her for not being able to provide him the refuge he’s needed.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t know if it’s the tea or the stress of the last few days or the sound of his voice, but she’d drifted off on his couch. 

She doesn’t realize this until she wakes up, alone, in his dark living room with the blanket scratching at her chin. 

Her neck is stiff and her back is sore from sleeping in the upright position she’d been in and she wonders if this is how one is supposed to feel after a life affirming epiphany.

Blanket tossed aside, she softly pads over to the door of his bedroom, which he’d left open in invitation. She leaned against the door frame, watching him sleep. She’d told him everything. She’d told him of a past she wasn’t exactly proud of and a present that she didn’t know was perfect until she thought about not having it. 

She can’t imagine it, a universe where she didn’t meet him. She can’t imagine never leaving Daniel, never leaving Jack, never leaving medicine. She’d told Daniel she didn’t know what she had, but she did. She does. She has this. This frustrating, stubborn, force of a man who has turned her entire world upside down and became everything.

"Come to bed, Scully," he murmurs into his pillow and she smiles. Of course he’d know she was there.

She undresses slowly, taking the time to fold her clothes over a chair before sliding into bed with him. His sheets are cool but his body is warm and he wraps it around her, enveloping her. How could she have ever chosen a path that didn’t lead her here? Impossible.

She mumbles an apology about falling asleep, he tells her that he’s used to it. She can fall asleep anywhere. 

The room is quiet in contrast to the storm outside. She hears the branches hitting the window, the rain pouring, the rumbling of distant thunder. For some reason she thinks of destiny and ghost ships and she silently thanks the 1939 version of herself that Mulder swears saved the world. She thanks whatever she can think of that made sure she ended up exactly where she should be.

"I love you," she tells him as if she’s been telling him every day for years. 

Good morning, Mulder, I love you. Where are we going today, Mulder? I love you. You’re not really suggesting this is aliens, Mulder? I love you. We have a meeting with Skinner at 9, Mulder, I love you. Where’d you put that car rental receipt, Mulder? I love you. Mulder, you’re crazy, and I love you.

He reacts as if he’s heard it a million times. 

"I know," he says.

He makes love to her, sweetly and slowly and softly and she feels like she’s home. No, she never could have lived a life without this. He was inevitable.

It isn’t until later, when he’s fallen asleep, that she realizes she’d forgotten the sadness. Not a moment was spent mourning what could never be. This is enough, she thinks. If this is all she can get, if this is the rest of her life, this is enough. 

She still leaves in the morning, needing to change clothes. She refuses to show up wearing yesterday’s outfit. She still fears office rumors and gossip, though most of it’s true by this point. 

He doesn’t stir when she leaves his bed. They both know she’ll be back. She isn’t going anywhere.

 

* * *

 

Hollywood is a strange place.

Nothing here is quite real. Nobody here is quite real. There’s a stale artificiality to everything and everyone that you come into contact with and you start to wonder if there’s anything genuine about any of it. 

There is. 

There’s something genuine in the way she laughs at him, sitting on a sound stage, trying to make sure he knows that a stupid movie is just a stupid movie. There’s something genuine in the way his eyes light up when she flashes a Bureau credit card. There’s something genuine in the way he pulls her up, walks off with her, hand in hand. 

He genuinely loves her in her little black dress and headband, never getting the opportunity to see her like this. She genuinely loves the way he kisses her in a limo that could take them anywhere they wanted to go, but the hotel is the only place they want to be. 

When he’s inside her, dress and headband still in place, he genuinely feels like he’s done something right. He must have, to deserve this. 

When he groans her name, she genuinely believes that there’s a place in their unpredictable world for some stability.

When he empties himself into her, they genuinely believe in miracles. Even if it’s just for a moment. Just a split second where they believe that this could be it. Here, in the city of angels in a hotel they’d otherwise never be able to justify staying in, they silently plead with a God she thinks she’s forgotten and one he’s never known. Please, just this once, give us a break. We won’t ask for anything else. Give us this.

She imagines finding out she’s pregnant. She imagines telling him. She isn’t sure how she’d do it or where. The details aren’t important. She can picture his face, though, when she tells him. Lighting up with an enthusiasm she used to know in him. He’d look as young as he did when she met him, full of promise and unlimited possibilities. He wouldn’t believe her and she’d laugh, make some clichéd joke about wanting to believe. He’d take her in his arms, gently because he treats her like she’s made of glass sometimes. 

She’d give him the family he deserved. He’d give her the normal life she’s been saying she wants. They’d walk away from a basement office and never look back.

This is the ideal, an unrealistic possibility. This scenario belongs to other people. Normal people. Not them, never them, they’d never have this. 

But he’s a dreamer. He taught her to be one as well. So for them, she’ll dream.

 

* * *

 

He won’t tell her what his last wish was. She supposes it doesn’t matter, but she still tries to guess. 

She knows what she’d wish for him.

She’d wish that he’d been born to a father who loved him and a mother who didn’t turn a blind eye. She’d wish Samantha had grown up into the lovely woman she’s sure she would have been. Married, perhaps, with children. Children who would roll their eyes at his silly jokes. She’d wish that he’d have still ended up at the Bureau but hadn’t ended up as a punchline to a joke. She’d wish his brilliance had been embraced and celebrated rather than hidden away in a basement.

But to grant him these wishes, to right all his wrongs, she’d have to give him up. 

Bill and Teena Mulder are good parents and Samantha never gets taken and Mulder has a normal childhood and grows up privileged and loved and nobody calls him names behind his back.

He’s happy, but she never gets assigned to him, never knocks on his door and shakes his hand and never tells him that she doesn’t believe in the existence of extra terrestrials.

She never tells her mother about the strange man with the strange name and he never sits by a hospital bed and waits for her to be returned to him.

She never gets a tattoo and she never gets cancer and he never nearly tells her that her life is his life, too.

They never nearly kiss in a hallway, he never tells her she saved him because he never needs saving, and he never goes to the ends of the earth for her.

He never asks her to dance, he never teaches her how to play baseball and never tells her he loves her. He never kisses her on New Year’s, she never asks him to father her child and they never need a miracle in the first place.

They never become two people carrying the weight of dead sisters and unborn children.

She feels selfish when she realizes that she wouldn’t wish this for him after all. She’d want to, but could never bring herself to do it. 

He’s mumbling that she’s missing the movie, but she’s tipsy by now and doesn’t care. Sorry, Mulder, I’m too busy thinking of the life you should have had but it doesn’t have me in it so I don’t want you to have it.

Maybe she’d meet him somehow anyway, under normal circumstances, where they strike up a conversation and she falls in love with his voice and he falls in love with her eyes and they live a good, long life. Maybe. But if she can’t be sure, then it would never be worth the risk.

This is a guy movie and he’s right, this popcorn is disgusting but he’s eaten nearly half of it and now he isn’t paying attention either. His hands are starting to roam under her white sweater and she hopes he believed her when she told him she was fairly happy.

She was. Is. 

This is a good life, she thinks as she feels his lips on her neck. Yes, she could do this forever. 

 

* * *

 

She isn’t sure what it is about Bellefleur, Oregon but it seems to cause her to run into his arms in hotel rooms.

This is a different version of him than the last time she remembers doing this.

This version doesn’t tell her that his sister and a government conspiracy are all that matters to him. No, this version is holding her and whispering into her ear about how there’s so much more she needs to do with her life. She’s the sole focus of his energy now. 

He’s grown up.  

They’ve come full circle and what once was so important, what once consumed and defined him, has faded into the background. 

He’s not quite ready to walk away, not quite ready to get out of the car, but he’s getting there. It’s almost time.

Had she known, she’d have begged him to stay. She’d have clung to him in the hallway of the Hoover building and pleaded her case. 

Don’t go, Mulder. 

Don’t leave me, Mulder. 

I’m pregnant, Mulder. 

It’s yours, Mulder. 

We got our miracle, Mulder. 

It’s everything we ever wanted, Mulder.

You can’t walk away from us, Mulder.

We need you, Mulder.

She wonders if he still would have left. She isn’t sure. Part of her thinks he would have, that he wouldn’t have been able to help himself. He’d grown up but that childlike curiosity was still there. But then a part of her remembers the night IVF failed, the night they’d shed tears for a child that would never be, the night they frantically attempted to make it happen anyway. That part of her thinks he’d have stayed.

He’d have stayed. 

But she didn’t know, curses herself for not knowing, wonders how she could have been so blind. She wonders when it happened. After England? In Hollywood? During Caddyshack? She can’t be bothered to do the math. It doesn’t matter. 

She can’t ask for another miracle, she knows she’s used hers all up. 

So she watches Skinner break down, watches her mother break down, listens to her brother tell her he told her so. She wonders how long he’s been waiting for the moment that Fox Mulder failed her. 

_"We’re so sorry, Dana."_

They mean well but the apologies and sad eyes make her cringe. This loss is monumental and she isn’t sure they even know what they’re sorry for.

Sorry your life turned out this way, Dana. Sorry he left you, sorry you fell in love with him, sorry you got what you asked for, sorry you paid the price, sorry you got greedy. Should have been a doctor, Dana!

Friends of her mother’s send her flowers since she’s lost touch with friends of her own.

There’s an odd combination of “Congratulations!” and “Our thoughts are with you during this difficult time!”

She supposes they don’t make cards for barren women like her who find out they’re pregnant when the father of the unborn child has just been abducted by aliens. 

She’d laugh at her own circumstances but she just doesn’t have it in her anymore. The only other person who’d find it funny isn’t here to laugh with her.

She’ll find him, she tells them all. He’ll be back. He always comes back. 

All of her paths led her to him and he’ll find his way back to her.

Samantha’s favorite color was purple but she got taken, a twelve year old boy blamed himself, and now here they are. Here she is. 

He’ll come back.


End file.
